Computer Graphics World

o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 5 c g w 2 1 John Blackburn, Aspyr IT operations manager lishing blockbuster titles, Aspyr's workflows are deeply rooted in collaboration—both internally and with intellectual property (IP) holders, studios, contractors, and partners around the world. "Our main business is bringing back old games and there are three ways we do that—reformatting games from new platforms, remas- tering for a faceli, and rebuilding from the ground up with modern graphics, all while expanding the game to as many modern platforms as possible," explains Blackburn. "The creativity really comes in when you're adding new features to old things," Blackburn continues. "You can be like, 'oh, that thing in the sky that kind of looked like a blob before? Well, it's actually a space ship." At any given time, Aspyr has five to ten games in active develop- ment. From very early ideation to release and post-support, it's very common for the team to have a bunch of projects being worked on at the same time. Code, Complexity, and Costly Delays As games have continued to grow in size and complexity, so have the files and code required to build them. "[The size of game files] varies wildly," Blackburn said. "We have had builds for Android and iOS that can be maybe 3GB—so not huge. But then we have projects that are over 60-100GB. So [file sizes] can get larger in gaming, for sure, es- pecially if you're sending full repositories." All of Aspyr's files are stored in AWS—nothing lives on physical ma- chines. A build node grabs the game repository, copies it locally, runs the necessary build scripts, and then outputs the game build. That file is sent to an S3 bucket under a subfolder, and each game has its own subfolder. Aspyr's teams are distributed worldwide and they frequently need to package source—oen large repositories stored in AWS S3—and make it available outside of their Austin HQ. External teams then work with the source code and come back to Aspyr with solutions. In a business driven by licensing deals and tight deadlines, transfer delays are costly to the bottom line. "We were telling partners this could be delayed days because we were babysitting a file that was uploading, and we didn't know if it failed," Blackburn said. Time to Level Up File Transfers Aer Blackburn started at Aspyr, he quickly realized that their file transfer system wasn't appropriate for their business needs and growth. Having experience using transfer tools like Signiant, Aspera, FTP, and Google Drive in previous roles, Blackburn knew there were better options available than what they were using. "From all those, I liked Signiant the best, personally," he recalls. "I did my own RFP process. And as far as ease of use as a feature set, Signiant was what we were looking for, for sure," Blackburn recollects. Signiant Media Shuttle is trusted by the gaming industry's leading developers, designers, publishers, and more. With patented file ac- celeration technology, Signiant practically eliminates latency, taking advantage of all available bandwidth, without restrictions. With rock-solid reliability built into the platform, Media Shuttle automatically resumes any interrupted transfers from the point of failure. Blackburn has found this particularly helpful as he is notified

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